1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to network monitoring, and more particularly, to efficiently determining network delay.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditionally, mobile communication networks such as Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network employed circuit switching architectures and technologies whereby hardware circuits establish connections between a calling and a called party throughout the network. This circuit switching architecture was improved upon by a General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) network architecture, which incorporated packet-switching technologies to transport data as packets without the establishment of dedicated circuits. A 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) organization improved upon the GPRS architecture and provided guidelines for implementing new system topologies for a 3GPP mobile communication network. The GPP community particularly modeled its network on IP (Internet Protocol) based routing techniques and is generally referred to as Evolved 3GPP Packet Switched Domain—also known as the Evolved Packet System (EPS).
When designing, maintaining, and/or operating any communication network—e.g., GSM networks, GPRS networks, EPS networks, and the like—data flows are monitored and analyzed to provide important insight into potential network problems as well as provide insight into a current state of the network (e.g., Quality of Service parameters, etc.). Such network monitoring is used to address existing network problems as well as to improve overall network design.
However, with an increasingly large consumer adoption of mobile devices, the amount of network data to be monitored quickly becomes unwieldy and proves expensive both in terms of hardware support and also in terms of resource usage. For example, some conventional network monitoring techniques require, in part, end-to-end data correlation of incoming data packets with outgoing data packets for a node or network interface and typically requires a large amount of network resources (e.g., dedicated network monitoring resources or otherwise). Further, the conventional monitoring techniques indicate network delay at a very high level and fails to provide meaningful insight into specific target locations where delay occurs. Such high level delay is further complicated by Diameter Routing Agents (DRAs), which were introduced to ensure that messages are routed among the correct nodes for the increasingly complex LTE networks. DRAs potentially introduce delay at specific network locations, which prove hard to detect using conventional monitoring techniques. Accordingly, despite such conventional efforts, a need remains to provide efficient network monitoring techniques that identify delay on a granular scale.